Field Marks: The Poetry of Don McKay

by Don McKay, Méira Cook (Editor)

This volume features thirty-five of Don McKay’s best poems, which are selected with a contextualizing introduction by Méira Cook that probes wilderness and representation in McKay, and the canny, quirky, thoughtful, and sometimes comic self-consciousness the poems adumbrate. Included is McKay’s afterword written especially for this volume in which McKay reflects on his own writing process―its relationship to the earth and to metamorphosis. Don McKay has published eight books of poetry. He won the Governor General’s Award in 1991 (for Night Field ) and in 2000 (for Another Gravity ), a National Magazine Award (1991), and the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry in 1984 (for Birding, Or Desire ). Don McKay was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize for Camber and was the Canadian winner of the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize for Strike/Slip . Born in Owen Sound, Ontario, McKay has been active as an editor, creative writing teacher, and university instructor, as well as a poet. He has taught at the University of Western Ontario, the University of New Brunswick, The Banff Centre, The Sage Hill Writing Experience, and the BC Festival of the Arts. He has served as editor and publisher of Brick Books since 1975 and from 1991 to 1996 as editor of The Fiddlehead . He resides in British Columbia.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published January 3, 2006

About the author

Don McKay is an award-winning Canadian poet, editor, and educator.

McKay was educated at the University of Western Ontario and the University of Wales, where he earned his PhD in 1971. He taught creative writing and English for 27 years in universities including the University of Western Ontario and the University of New Brunswick.

In June 2007, he won the Griffin Poetry Prize for Strike/Slip (2006). He is the co-founder and manuscript reader for Brick Books, one of Canada's leading poetry presses, and was editor of the literary journal The Fiddlehead from 1991-96.

In 2008, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada.[2]

Reviews

[Abigail · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I remember
about the Great Blue Heron that rose
like its name over the marsh
is touching and holding that small
manyveined
wrist
upon the gunwale, to signal silently -
look

the Great Blue Heron
(the bidboned wrist).

- The Great Blue Heron, pg. 4

* * *

Along the scarecrow's arms & head & shoulders sit
the blackbird
laughing.

"This is an image of a scarecrow
thinking about blackbirds" they
laugh, thinking of themselves as the thinking
of the scarecrow - ha!
hilarity
fills the air around the scarecrow.

This could almost twist the stitched
mouth into smiling.
To his blackbirds he seems suddenly
bemused.

- Lependu nearly materialized by his blackbirds, pg. 11

* * *

What is there to say
when the sky pours in the window
and the ground begins to eat its figures?
We sit like dummies in our kitchen, deaf
among enormous crumplings of light.
Small wonder each thing looms
crowding its edge.
In silent movies everyone overacts a little.

It would be nice to breathe the air inside the cello.
That would satisfy one
thirst of the voice. As it is

only your ribcage speaks for me now,
a wicker basket full of sorrow and wish, so tough
so finely tuned we have often
reinvented the canoe

and paddled off.
It would be nice to write the field guide for those riverbanks,
to speak without names of the fugitive
nocturnal creatures that live and die in our lives.

- Another Theory of Dusk, pg. 27

* * *

The wolf at the door
and the wolf in the forest and the work
work work of art. The scrape,
the chop, the saw tooth
tasting maple. The cradle, the cup, the muscle
in your mother's arm and back
and pelvis, muscle flexing in the air
between two people arguing,
two people loving, muscle
pumping blood. Gut
summoned to speak. The rotary cuff, the wrist,
having learnt the trick of witching wands and locks,
the heft, the grain, the web,
the rub of moving parts.
And the tiny sea in the ear
and the moth wing in the mind, which wait.

- Early Instruments, pg. 33

* * *

astounded, astonied, astunned, stopped short
and turned stone, the moment
filling with its slow
stratified time. Standing there, your face
cratered by its gawk,
you might be the symbol signifying aeon.
What are you, empty or pregnant? Somewhere
sediments accumulate on seabeds, seabeds
rear up into mountains, ammonites
fossilize into gems. Are you thinking
or being thought? Cities
as sand dunes, epics
as e-mail. Astonished
you are famous and anonymous, the border
washed out by so soft a thing as weather. Someone
inside you steps from the forest and across the beach
toward the nameless all-dissolving ocean.

- Astonished -, pg. 48